Self-Directed Learning for Early Childhood Educator Growth

PRESENTER

Nancy Alexander

Nancy Alexander is the Director of the NSU Child and Family Network at Northwestern State University of Louisiana, where she leads initiatives that support early childhood educators across the state. With a background in child development and over three decades of experience in early childhood education, she has dedicated her career to improving the quality of care and education for young children. She specializes in professional development, licensing support, and technical assistance for child care providers. Under her leadership, the NSU Child and Family Network has become a trusted resource for educators seeking meaningful, accessible training–now including self-directed learning through tools like GoReact.

TRANSCRIPT

Heather Lund:

I am pleased to introduce Nancy Alexander. She’s the director of the NSU Child and Family Network at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. Welcome, Nancy.

Nancy Alexander:

Hi, I am delighted to be here. My camera didn’t want to work this morning, but you’ll be able to hear me just fine and it may start working a little later in the session, who knows with technology, but I wanted to give you a little background on how we’ve been using GoReact and why we looked at it in order to meet some needs that we had. We’re really more connected to birth to three programs, so we’re working with adults who work with very young children. We’re a resource agency that does an extensive amount of training over a 16 parish area for you. That’s a county, but we’re in Louisiana and here they’re parishes. So we have a very big area, some of it is rural. We’re also working with people who may have limited computer experience. They may use their computer primarily for searching the internet or for email or their phones for texting and such.

So they may not have a lot of experience. They also very short of time, they work long days. Typically the wages are not particularly great, but they work with our most prized possession, which is our children in our state. And our job is to help them meet the needs of those children who are primarily birth to three. You may think, but they don’t need much. They just need feeding and safety. But yet much of the brain of young children is developing in those years. And so we want people to understand how to react, how to build language skills, how to help children develop concepts and as well as social skills and other things that are appropriate for their age. We work a good bit with fours and fives too, in addition to the birth to three. So what we will need to do, and of course we’ve done face-to-face training for years and we do a lot of it.

Our record is 15 separate three hour sessions on a Saturday in five locations. And so that was a one time event. So not how much we usually do, but it gives you an idea of the extent and the amount of the training that we are doing because we had a rural area and we did switch to virtual training during covid and were able to carry on all of our training at that time and then switch back to face-to-face. But we found that the travel time to the rural areas and other things or their time to us was something of a problem. Along the same time, the state provided funds to buy some new curriculum and I have a special interest in toddlers, which are primarily your 18 months to three because that’s such an age for language development as well as social skills, physical development, and all of the others.

So we found that even though the state divided the funds by the curriculum, it came in nine different boxes. And so it was a bit intimidating for people that had not had experience with curriculum and we needed a way to introduce it in bite-size forms to have a way that we could give it to them, help them understand it in a step-by-step way. So along with that need to do that, we had the challenges of the limited times of teachers, the fact that they need time to reflect on their experience and relate new information to their work setting and to practice new skills. We have to practice to get good at anything. And in many cases, people are not accustomed to talking to very young children, particularly if maybe they are doing and just responding, but they’re not saying words and yet that language and that interaction is critical for their brain development.

We also found that many of our clients we worked with needed very specific targeted feedback to support them in working on these new behaviors of carrying on conversations with young children. So we needed a way to do that, and GoReact was one way we thought would work for that purpose. They also need the teacher turnover. Lemme back up. The teacher turnover is especially high in this field. And so as such, we’re constantly working with new people. So we came up with a solution that the activities as GoReact is designed, had to be short, 30 minutes to one hour. Teachers can hardly get away from their main job of caring for the children more than 30 minutes to an hour. And our coaching sessions are generally one to two hours at a time. So we’re working around that. We worked with stimulus videos that exemplified the desired teacher behavior.

And so we found videos that we liked that showed teachers how they should be interacting with young children. We wanted reflective questions based on the video content and we wanted each one to build on the teacher’s prior experience. If you’re familiar with blues technology, it was moving from what’s happening to things like why do you think the teacher did so? And so we develop coaching sessions and in addition to all the training, we do a lot of coaching too. So where we go on site, but we’re moving towards some video coaching. So the coaching session, we wanted to be based on a video recorded by the participant engaging in a component of the curriculum with a small group of children. And we wanted to reinforce the content, the concepts from that self-directed experience through their reflection with their coach and targeted very open-ended questions and then feedback on the video and then creating an action plan for future growth, all of which fits what we know about working with adults and changing behavior on that.

So this was our goal and we found, we worked with GoReact quite a bit. There was a learning curve for us because we’re using it in a way that it wasn’t exactly designed for, but we were able to find ways to do that. So the plan was teachers would have things that they would go in to GoReact and they would do on their own watching a video, answering the reflective questions about it. So that was part of it, so that in 30 minutes to an hour they could benefit from the videos and the process of asking questions. And then after a couple of those, then they would video themselves using the guidelines from the videos. And by the way, when we’re talking about videos, there always needs to be, and I have another handout about it, but you always want to do something with the video.

If you just show a video, people may go to sleep on you. I swear I was doing a webinar one time and I’d had a rather big lunch and it was kind of a nice warm day. And so it was, maybe I was a little too relaxed, but I swear, I think I put on a video in my virtual training and I really think I dosed off all of a sudden it just hit me. So at least they had the video going. But when you see things like that, you really need to be conscious of the fact that just watching something is not enough and it does need to be short, but there needs to be an activity related to it. And there needs to be some guidelines at the beginning such as watch this video to see how the teacher addresses a discipline issue by redirecting the child, something where they’re going to watch for something.

And then there needs to be some kind of summary. And ideally, if there are group will, they can comment, discuss, or at least answer some good reflective questions because we know reflection is one good way to teach teacher skills. So now let me close my handout and I’m going to share and let’s hope this is going to do what I want it to do. This is the first segment, the particular curriculum that we were working with to implement the one that comes in nine different boxes. So it’s got a lot of materials. The first thing we do is to go out to the center and help them organize the materials. For instance, one thing that is used is photo cards where children talk about a photo and it works through a theme where maybe the theme is pets. Well, here’s a photo of a dog and they talk about the dog using language of, do you know what kind of dog this is?

Do you have a dog? What does your dog need? How do you take care of your dog? So you’re building language, you’re relating it to the child’s experience. And the questions are to help the child think, how do you think the dog feels in this picture? What do you think the dog is doing? And maybe he’s playing with a ball. And so you talk about what’s going on in the picture. And so that’s one of ’em. Another major component is reading books where the teacher reads them aloud to the children and talks to them about different aspects. So I want to call your attention to a couple of other things that we wound up doing because our goal is to make this as easy as possible, very self-directed so people don’t have to call us any more than necessary. Say, well, I can’t do this, or I can’t do that, and what do I do?

And so I typed in the instructions, click on the details to see questions about the video, click on comments, answer the questions in the add a comment space below. So when the student opens this, she sees these and most of them are she’s, but she or he will see these instructions. So they click on details and they have their questions and then they can answer them down here. And of course their instructor will help them during a coaching session, they’ll discuss their answers to the questions. Now you’ll notice that we ask them to put sticky notes on the book or the questions they want to ask. The important thing about the book is the building language, not only concept about differences in people and likenesses, but also the language and the words. So the purpose of reading a book with young children is not only the new language, but the talking about the book and those interactions.

And incidentally, if you work with people who work with older children, reading books allowed to children is still a very good activity. I taught third grade at one time, and if everyone got their work done, we could read a chapter, I would read aloud a chapter, we went to lunch and children really looked forward to it. We read wonderful books that I had never read, things like Lassie Come Home, black Beauty, Swiss Family Robinson, the Wizard of Oz was a favorite and a number of others. Robinson Caruso chapter books that were maybe a little higher for third grade reading level, black beauty had a pretty high level vocabulary, but that’s building listing skills. It’s building concepts and language. And incidentally, I ran into a former third grade student the other day and the first thing she said after she recognized me was how much she looked forward to hearing me read The Wizard of Oz every day before we went to school. So reading aloud to children is something that doesn’t end at kindergarten. It’s good for children of all ages. So this was set up and just to show you a little more of the GoReact way, we’ve set it up in three parts to look at the main part and let me get out of my mask user.

We will give it just a minute to do what I wanted to do. Alright, so I set it up in folders because we wanted to give the student no more. We don’t want them to get lost in the software so that my student could only see read aloud and photo cards. These are the three main components of the curriculum. Books to read, photo cards and music. And it all relates to a theme. For example, if the theme is a form, the music is going to include farmer in the dele and some popular songs to get children to get children to. And I’m sorry, someone just brought me a note and I got distracted here. So we want to have children to relate concepts, as you know, oh, McDonald has the animal sounds and it’s got some repetition in it and children like it because it’s fun to make sounds.

So each of the activities will relate to that theme. So the photo cards will be animals, the read aloud, the stories will be stories about the farm and so on. So whatever the theme is, the activities relate to it. So our student goes in and she only sees read aloud because we’re doing it in bite-size sections, remember? And we’re also doing it to simplify it as much as possible. So she only sees this, but she does see the activities in order. So that’s the video. The first one is the video that she sees, and then we have another activity for her where we address the parent sheets that you give out and lesson plan forms. And then there’s an observation of her, another video to watch that was a YouTube video and an activity that goes with it, some questions to respond to or an activity.

And then her final review is at the end, and of course she does two. Number three is her actually doing a video. So she gets feedback, she watches some more and then she does another one and that’s the end of that part. And then she’s invited to the photo cards and has a similar experience and then she’s invited to music. And then after that she gets a certificate for a certain number of hours of training. So I will show you a few of the others here. For instance, we set this up where she can click on the instructions and we also had to write simple instructions for this. So if she clicks on instructions, then she can open the lesson plan and the parent sheet, which she sends out, it’s actually a half sheet each week to help the parents get ideas for things they can do at home. And then this is a PowerPoint that while we can’t show it like a PowerPoint, we can do. And I think I’ve covered up my, yeah, here it is. Okay, so we can do it this way. And it reviews the information from the video. So you may remember this as being some of the concept to just reinforce it from the video. So let’s go back. Oops, that’s not the right one.

Here we go. Really amazingly easy to set up. We had quite a time mastery GoReact because well, for one thing, we’re trying to do something different from what it’s really intended for. If you just stick with the videos and feedback, but we’re trying to put instructions in the videos to watch, were pretty easy. Alright, so let’s look. And again, here’s another independent one that works very similar. You see the student can go in, they see the instructions and they see the questions and they can answer those. And so you can look at about four activities that are, I’m trying to click on stop and I’ve got something that I don’t want.

No. Alright, I don’t know how I got that pencil. Let me, there we go. Okay, so that just doesn’t want to do what I want it to do. I don’t know why it’s doing that, but it is. Anyway, alright, so that gives you an idea of how this works. Now we have similar, this is the read aloud, but we have similar things with the photo cards and how to use them. We have a video that we made for that. And so it’s a kind of go through at your own pace with a check-in the coach and using the typical meeting online system. So let me get back to where I can get to my hand handout, which was in this one and GoReact. Maybe you have this and I don’t know it, but when I’m working on it, it gets to be a pain for the video to start automatically. And I wish we’d had a wave that we could set it start automatic or don’t start automatic because just having to constantly cut it off when you’re working on it, particularly during the learning stage stage for us. So if y’all have that, let me know. I wasn’t familiar with it. Okay, so here we go. See that’s and why is it doing that?

I don’t really want to do that. Well I think I can, let me just call it up from my computer to show you my other handout or I probably could have gotten it from my library. As you see, I have a lot of files. Okay, I am hoping you’re still seeing my screen. So I wanted to share with you a couple of thoughts because we want everyone to like use videos because people can see them, can see activities in action and in the field that we work in, people do not go through a student teacher type experience. And so what they know is pretty much how things are done in their own room, where they work. And so they don’t have a broad experience of seeing necessarily ideal exemplary programs or even seeing a variety of programs. So we do use a lot of videos and these are some of the things that I’ve kind of figured out or learned or thought was important about using videos and getting the most from them.

So I think the first thing is selecting them because what people see and hear is going to stick with them a while. And so if they see things that are inappropriate and then that’s what they think is what they’re supposed to do, you’re only promoting inappropriate experiences. So there may be a case where you use something that as an example of what’s wrong with this picture kind of thing. What could be done better? We do a lot of what else do you think would work? Examples, but typically you want to be sure that you’re selecting the videos pretty well. So you select or create videos to fit the attention span of most people. I remember in the early days of VHS, most of them were 30 minutes long. We were using videos where we sat and watched for 30 minutes and at most you would stop them to talk about something that had been addressed or had happened and then you had a good many talking heads, which were only using the auditory sense with the auditory and visual sense, but you’re not seeing examples of what they’re talking about.

So short is best. A quick video two, three minute clip that makes a point is very useful in breaking up the pace and breaking up the activities particularly for virtual training. And then don’t try to include too much information. We have here some training that is required that just, it’s like the teacher in the Charlie Brown movies and you get to hearing and all those sounds without hearing words after a while. And on top of that they’re recorded PowerPoints with way too much text and so a slide is opened up and a lady pretty much reads the text on the screen and so what do people get out of that? They meet the requirements of having training in that topic, but they don’t really get too much from it. When you think about adult learning, adult learning is so much like children because you still, if you’re doing a training session, you need to fit the attention span, you need chances to use information, you need activities you need.

Humor is always good. And so it’s not so terribly different other than adults or more self-directed. And adults, children are curious because they’re curious, but adults want to know that there’s a reason for them to learn something new and preferably it’s something that will make their job easier. So short is good, don’t include too much information after a while they quit listening. I like texts for major points. If you don’t have them in a video you’re using, you can always create them. It’s a good way of summarizing points and a lot of videos that you might get off of the YouTube we’ll have built in texts similar to what you saw in the one that Carmen did. So if not, then you can have a follow-up activity where you list the four or five points or have a question about some of the key points that are in the video.

It helps them summarize and organize their thoughts about a video that they just watch. So you want thought provoking questions, not just what did the teacher do about the story, but something, how did the teacher gain the children’s attention in reading the story? How did the teacher relate it to the child’s previous life? What kind of questions did the teacher ask? So if you’re not familiar with Bloom’s taxonomy, it’s something that’s worth looking at starting with the simple questions like what color is this? Which is not an opening due question because you’re expecting them to give the right answer down to how many colors like this can you find in the room, which is a more complex question and master the ability to wait. There’s something about a pause or a wait or a silence that someone will eventually speak up. If you do much public speaking, you’re probably used to the times that you may say, are there any questions?

And nobody speaks up. And if you just go right on and say, oh, okay, well we’ll complete our session. But if you wait with a sense of expectation, then people will often speak up. And that’s very true in working with children. You have to wait to give them a chance to think about what they’re going to say. And the same is true with adults that you’re teaching. If you move too fast and if you succumb to that sense of, well you didn’t answer so I won’t give you the right answer, then you miss the opportunity for good thoughts about what’s going on. So always include a means to relate new content to what viewers already know. Analogies, comparisons, similes help build understanding when you can say, well this is like when you so and so. So I use for adults the importance of room arrangement and where children can find things easily as comparing it to a grocery store.

If you go in the grocery store, then you know that if you want milk, it’s going to be back there in the dairy session. And if you want some apples, it’s going to be over with the produce. If you want some ice cream, it’s going to be in the frozen section because things are organized in a relationship. That’s an analogy to talk about arranging the furniture and the equipment into interest centers in a pre-K room where you have the book area where the books are, you have the art area where the art supplies are and so on and consider the what’s in it for me. With videos, we often call that WM in training. What’s in it for me? Because one of the things you want to do at the beginning is to help people understand how this will help me. In the case of room arrangement I was just talking to you about, it might be the children will be engaged more when they’re engaged more.

You have fewer discipline problems. The children will develop more independence, they can get what they want and they can use it as long as they want. Then you can communicate the why of learning, help people understand why they need to do this besides the fact that it may be required. So always include that whenever you can, why it’s easy or why you’re doing things a certain way. And then when it’s appropriate, humor can also be good. I like little stories that are funny. You don’t have to be a comedian at all, but humor stories will help keep people’s attention. And there are a lot of videos that you can find that have numerous settings. There’s one where the one about renting a car and having a reservation. If you want to email me, I can probably send you a link. There’s a great one on communication where a woman has a nail in her head and she’s trying to communicate this and they’re not hearing her. There’s another one with that deals with assessment or evaluation observation where people are playing baseball or basketball and they’re dribbling a basketball among two teams and you’re asked to watch to see how many times the ball is passed. And if you’re watching for that, you don’t see this guy dressed up as a bear across the background. So when you can find videos like that that make a point, then they’re good to put in because they will add some humor and people will enjoy it. Humor helps.

New learning stick. Alright, so I’m going to take a look, see if we have any questions or Heather are you may be monitoring the questions.

Heather Lund:

Yes, Nancy, thank you so much. We do not have any questions and unfortunately we are at the end of our time as well. But I do want to thank you for showing us your self-directed experience for learners. I think it’s always a great reminder as well for just communicating the why of learning, making those short videos, adding the humor and then those different components before your learners go in and actually record themselves in the classroom. I think that’s really beneficial.

Nancy Alexander:

Well, and if anyone hears my contact information, if you’re working with early childhood and GoReact, I’d love to connect because you may have figured out some things that work well that we could benefit from and vice versa.

Heather Lund:

Wonderful, thank you.

Nancy Alexander:

Thank you all. Bye-bye.